ATI has made a notable comeback over the past year with enticing GPU releases that have been able to match and sometimes surpass Nvidia's offerings in terms of performance, power consumption and value.

As things stand today, the GeForce GTX 280 is the fastest single GPU graphics card available, while the standard Radeon HD 4870 is not too far behind it. Yet the Radeon costs less than $300, while the GTX 280 is selling for roughly $450, giving AMD some generous pricing headroom to play with.

So, trying to make the most of this situation, for $559 AMD has come up with the Radeon HD 4870 X2, which follows the same premise of previous generation X2 cards, taking two of the latest Radeon GPUs and sticking them on a single PCB. A terrifying prospect given the power of today's graphics processors. The Radeon HD 4870 X2 boasts an enviable combined processing power of 2.4TFLOPS, 60 Gtexels/s of bilinear filtering, and courtesy of some highly clocked GDDR5 memory, 230GB/s of memory bandwidth.